As someone who grew up in the Catskills myself, I think the Amazing Joey Michaels and his Fabulous Memes deserve some hand to hand music!posted by Smart Dalek at 4:12 AM on November 21, 2002

Interesting. I always wondered where the name alley oop came from. This (first) site also tantalizingly addresses another long-standing question I've had: how did the word "blue" as a slang term for "pornographic" originate? I once even submitted this question to some internet "word detective" or something, but to no avail. I can't get no satisfaction...posted by taz at 4:30 AM on November 21, 2002

Great links, Joey Michaels. The slang page, like all such amateur efforts, is loads of fun but must be taken with a grain of salt, since there are no dates or sources and there's no way of knowing whether a given term is specific to vaudeville or (as is clearly the case with a lot of them) simply a general slang term that vaudevillians also used.

taz: "Blue" is a notorious conundrum; the Cassell Dictionary of Slang gives three possible derivations: from "bluegown" ('prostitute,' used in the 16th century, when incarcerated prostitutes wore blue uniforms), from the French Bibliothèque bleue, or as the opposite of "brown" (also a mid-19th-century term) 'worthy, earnest, totally devoid of any double entendre or smut' (from "the brown clothes popular amonng the sedulously pure Quakers").posted by languagehat at 7:55 AM on November 21, 2002

Languagehat, I profoundly *heart* you! With the help of a few more accommodating threads, I imagine that I will eventually get to the root of a number of questions that have nagged my existence, and I won't be surprised if you are the source for a great many of those answers...posted by taz at 10:16 AM on November 21, 2002

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